the shadows of time-eaten buttresses

My Favourite Things About Scotland used to run (1) Belle & Sebastian, (2) George Macdonald, (3) David Tennant, and (4) shortbread. Now I have to add (5), Glasgow University. Good lord, but that's an unreasonably lovely campus. There's an enormous, very green, very beautiful park between my hotel and the main university buildings, which loom over the trees like a distant Gormenghastian vision. Glasgow has to be the only campus where the church looks like a university and the university looks like a cathedral. Photos tomorrow, when the light's right and I have time. But I wandered back to my hotel this evening through the more spectacular bits of campus gawping like a mere colonial. It seemed appropriate.

I think the day has gone quite well: two papers name-checked my book this morning, which has me feeling smug to a somewhat feline extent. Apparently I'm becoming the go-to fairy-tale theorist for metafiction. I wasn't entirely happy with the way my paper went, I'm all sinusy again and my brain is a bit fried so it felt incoherent, but people said nice things about it. Right now I'm busy bunking the evening's fiction readings on account of exhaustion. The recent glandular wossnames, and the merry hob they play with my gym schedule, have left me feek and weeble, and all the walking is getting to me.

The bits of the city I've seen, other than the university, are ... interesting. The people have been uniformly lovely, down-to-earth and friendly, but the taxi driver's discourse was all on recession and the closure of shipyards, and I pass an awful lot of closed businesses and run-down buildings as I toddle through the streets.

Also, I could have haggis for breakfast if I wanted. Which, frankly, I don't.